When land is being cleared of trees whose wood is suitable for little more than fire wood, the cut trees are often cut into fire wood at the tree cutting site and shipped to areas where fireplace wood may be marketed. However, there are few machines which are capable of handling relatively long logs and cutting those logs into fireplace wood.
Although various machines have been designed for felling trees by a shearing action and various structures have been provided for cutting short log lengths into log sections of fireplace length and thereafter splitting the short log sections into multiple fireplace log pieces, little attention has been given to the concept of providing an apparatus which may be readily transported to a land clearing site and utilized to efficiently cut full length tree logs into fireplace wood.
Examples of log cutting and splitting devices which have been previously designed are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 705,659, 1,307,714, 1,441,996, 2,087,321, 2,704,093, 3,242,955, 3,542,100 and 3,862,651.